


forgive me for everything

by nebulousviolet



Category: The Mortal Instruments, The Shadowhunter Chronicles
Genre: 1920s, Character Study, Multi, Racial Slur, Racism, Violence, eventual lilaia, major death is raphael, one sided lily/raphael
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 21:52:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11518230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulousviolet/pseuds/nebulousviolet
Summary: Lily Chen has always been a little more human than most of her clan, no matter how hard she tries not to be.





	forgive me for everything

**Author's Note:**

> tv fans: you NEED to read the books to understand this character study, the characters within it and the two relationships it revolves around. i dont mean to be harsh, but please dont read this if you havent read the books. you wont understand whats going on.
> 
> i use the racial slur 'ch*nk' in a passage of speech. this is to reflect anti-chinese sentiment during the 20s. the speech does not reflect any of my own views in any way, shape or form.

“They’ve confirmed him as dead,” Elliott says, and his voice is gentle. Gentle for him, anyway. “You’re head of the clan now.”

Lily nods, stiff and regal, the way Raphael conducts himself. Used to conduct himself. He glances back at her, and his eyes soften a little.  
“You have until tomorrow to mourn,” he tells her, not unkindly. “They’ll expect you to be over it by then.”  
He leaves her, and only then does Lily fall to her knees and crumple in on herself, weeping blood. Her hair, long and glossy, sticks to her face, wet with red tears. She cries out, animalistic, and sobs harder. _Here lies Lily_ , she thinks, recalling his first ever words addressed directly to her. She unsheathes her fangs and bites down, hard, on her lip. Blood trickles down her chin, and she keeps biting, turning her lips into a sore, bloodied mess. Raphael is dead, and Lily gasps in unneeded air, her breath rasping. She has not breathed in years.

Somehow, she needs the oxygen now.

*

Lily dies on a warm summer evening, when the Prohibition is in full force and she still hasn’t grown out of her sister’s old clothes.

Money is tight. Her mother, Serene, has wrinkles that were not there the year before. Her father stays out at places best described as unscrupulous; alcohol is against the law, but then again so is prostitution, and that hasn’t stopped the pale, lovely girls lining the downtown streets from offering themselves for the price of a sandwich.  
“Lily, my Lily,” Serene used to say, back when Lily was still young enough to sit in her mother’s lap and relish in the feel of her smooth fingers winding delicate patterns in her hair. “You will marry a good man. A kind man. Someone who will provide. You are not stupid like your father or your sister, _wǒ cōngmíng de nǚhái_.”  
 _My clever girl_. Lily is her mother’s favourite, always has been.

Being her mother’s favourite did not stop her from dying.

It hurts. The vampire attacking her is small, with shiny black hair like her own but cut short, wearing a shimmering blue beaded dress. She nearly bleeds out there, alone, when the girl’s friend, or superior, whoever he is, catches up with them.  
“Dolly!” he scolds, and his face is lovely in the pale moonlight. Lily’s mother had always told her that in the stories, the gods would ease your pain when you were about to die. It must be true, because she feels almost nothing, just a pleasant warmth in her veins as she feels herself drifting away. “No, no, no, not yet, pretty one. Drink this.”  
It’s not the first time a man has called her pretty. His fingers are slick with blood, but it’s darker than the liquid staining her own collarbones and neck, pulsating out of her with every heartbeat. He presses them to her lips, and she manages to lick a little of it, the taste coppery in her mouth. Distantly, she hears music. It’s ragtime, her favourite. Dolly, the little dark-haired slip of a thing, frowns at Lily as the last of her life drains from her.  
“She’s just a chink,” she complains. “I mean, she’s pretty for one, but nobody will miss her.”  
“I’m not about to annoy Shadowhunters while Magnus Bane is in town,” the strange man explains, and Lily is drifting away on a current, away from this life and onto the next. “And pretty is still pretty.”

Lily takes a long, shuddering breath, and dies.

*

She takes a long drag of her cigarette, and stubs it out on the concrete next to her. Raphael makes a disapproving noise, and she laughs, turns it into a blanket of white noise to cloak around her shoulders and keep her warm. Lily hasn’t been warm for forty years.  
“Disgusting habit,” he comments, and she shrugs, presses the still-glowing cherry into the ground with the tip of her finger. Playing with fire as a vampire is dangerous, but Lily has never really been the cautious type, much to Raphael’s chagrin. “I don’t know why people still do it.”  
“It’s quick, and it’s cheap,” she remarks, drawing a hip flask out of her pocket. He scowls. “You know mundanes. They burn so bright, and they snuff out so quickly, so easily. Vice just makes that blaze go by a little quicker, a little easier.”  
“You don’t sound solid,” Raphael comments, his slender shoulders bare in the moonlight. Lily wonders what he’d do if she slung her arm around those slim shoulders, if she pressed her head into the space between his neck and his collarbones. “Not like the others. How long have you been like this?”

Lily stays quiet for a moment, lighting up another cigarette and staring off into the distance. The stars aren’t as bright as when she was alive, and even then they were covered with a heavy layer of smog. She wonders; in a hundred years, will these twinkling lights be gone entirely?

She will still be here, though. She will outlive the stars and the people who remember them.

“I was nineteen, when I died,” she tells him, blowing a smoke ring into the air. Vampires don’t exactly feel chill, but she can tell that it’s a cool night, not like the one when she bled out on the sidewalk with nobody to save her. “It was 1923. My mother’s mother and father were Chinese immigrants, like her husband. Back then, there was a lotta violence, lotta discrimination against people who looked like me. My mother sent me down to collect a dress for when she intended to match me off,” she takes another drag from the cigarette, willing her voice to stay even. “And I never came back. She’s called Dolly, the woman who killed me. She wasn’t going to Turn me, but her friend made me swallow some of his blood, and I became one of the Night’s Children.”  
“So you are not that old,” Raphael says, his voice hushed, and she shrugs, blows out the smoke with a little hatred.  
“I’d still be alive now,” she states. “Until you came along, I was the freshest meat they had. “

What she doesn’t say, is that when she joined the clan they jostled and jeered at her, called her names and mocked her when bloody tears stained her now-alabaster cheeks. What she doesn’t say, is that she tracked her mother down and listened to her sob about how her Lily, how her child was missing and how it was all her fault. What she doesn’t say is that she watched her mother die of grief, years before a woman as fit as her should’ve done. Lily was still tied, is still tied, to her mortal life, but that rope is fading and fraying and once it snaps, she doesn’t know what to do.

Perhaps Raphael sees it written on her face, because he stops talking about family and death after that.

*

 _He_ _reminds_ _me_ _of_ _Raphael_ , she’d said about Alec once, and it’s only the night after that she ponders the meaning of her words.

Alec does remind her of Raphael, and it’s true, that was originally what drew him to her, but the more she gets to know him, the more flaws she finds in the comparison. Raphael never smiled like Alec does, would never stay after official business to play round after round of cards with Maia and her like Alec does despite his accusations of Maia cheating. Raphael did feel, and he did love, but not bright or warm the way mortals, especially Alec, seem to do. Lily had watched him harden and grow colder over the years, and though she had loved him, it unsettled her.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever really get over him, her Raphael. Except he was never really hers, or anyone else’s, for that matter.

But the world keeps turning. She shows up to the weekly meetings with Magnus and Maia and Alec, watches Maia’s face light up a little when Lily asks her to get a coffee with her sometime at Taki’s, forces Elliott to examine her favourite Armani suit for stains when she goes to grab said coffee. Maia’s skin is a warm brown, comforting and flushed with the glow of humanity, the colour Raphael’s might have been when he was alive, properly, not undead. She doubts, however, that Raphael flushed a dusty rose when someone flirted with him the way Maia does, or that Raphael smelled like strawberry soap and raspberry shampoo, or that Raphael’s lips were such a fetching red when coated in Lily’s favourite lipstick.

Raphael never fell in love. Sometimes, Lily wonders if he would’ve ever had any kind of romantic love, had he lived. Perhaps he would’ve loved her back, in time. But he’s dead, and Maia is very, very much alive, and so that is that.

*

Clawing her way out of the grave hurts, but not as much as the thirst.

Lily’s mother once told her that she’d never be alone as long as she believed that the gods would protect her, but stood over the body of a homeless man, his blood staining her mouth, she has never felt so lonely.

*

 _“She’s so beautiful,_ " the party guests whisper, and the crowd parts around her. She looks striking; dark, hooded eyes against skin that’s shockingly pale thanks to the lack of blood pumping in her veins to give her colour, sleek black hair pulled behind her head into a neat cluster of curls. Her lips are red, the colour of human blood, and a soft, pale pink has been daubed on her cheekbones to make the white marble of her face stand out more.

Lily isn’t beautiful, she is terrifying, slender and tall like an elegant ribbon in a champagne-coloured dress. The music finishes, and men line up to dance with her, all of them wanting to look at this _exotic_ beauty. Except Lily isn’t exotic, she is a person, even if her heart doesn’t beat. She has lived here longer than they have, and yet they will expect her to speak with an accent, to be shy and quiet and submissive like they expect girls who look like her to be. If she wanted to, she could snap their wrists with a delicate flick of her fingers against their hands. They will ask her if she has ever been to China, and the more ignorant ones will assume she has been there already.

The worst ones will call her names and curse her for the actions of a country that isn’t even hers, for things that happened years ago.

But she keeps dancing, anyway.

*

“Lily,” Alec calls, and she turns on her heel. She’s become rather impartial to a pantsuit, these days, though Isabelle Lightwood’s various outfits tend to remind her of the merits of skirts and dresses. Alec looks tired, tired for a man who is not yet twenty, but he still smiles at her. Not as much in common with Raphael as she had once claimed. “I wanted to congratulate you. On whatever you’ve got going with Maia.”  
“You’re perceptive,” she says, and he smiles a little crookedly at her. He is not like other Shadowhunters, thought the fact that he’s even talking to her is proof enough of that, she supposes. “When did you figure that one out, Lightwood?”  
“I saw you two the other day,” he replies, shrugging. “Nobody who didn’t know both of you well would’ve guessed, but I saw you offer your arm to her, and I knew how hostile you first were.”  
“Oh dear,” she sighs. “I do have a reputation to keep up in this city. Disgusting.”  
“I don’t suppose,” he asks shyly. “I could, like, hug you or something? Not as vampire and Shadowhunter, but as friends. In congratulations.”  
She looks at him for a moment, and then breaks into a smile that matches his. Heels clicking on the tiled floor of Magnus’ apartment, she wraps her arms around him and squeezes, gently. He returns the pressure, and she almost can’t believe that she, Lily Chen, is hugging a good Nephilim boy from the house of Lightwood over a vampire-werewolf relationship. He smells vaguely of sandalwood, and somehow the fact that she has friends, people who are more than just allies or acquaintances of convenience, sinks in a little more with this esteemed Shadowhunter warrior in her grasp. They part, slowly, and she wonders what the Clave would think if they saw this.  
“See you next week,” she says, and walks out of the room.

*

“Did you love- did you love that cold man?” Maia asks her when the pair of them stand over the monument to Raphael built by the Spanish Harlem clan. The stone is cool granite, and Lily brushes her fingers over it reverently.  
“Don’t call him cold,” she says automatically, keeping her eyes fixed on the gravestone. “I don’t know. I don’t know at all.”

They stand there, in silence, until Maia gently pulls her hand away. She doesn’t protest.  
“C’mon,” she whispers. “Let’s go get some whiskey.”

They leave the only permanent reminder of Raphael Santiago behind.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr: vvorkangelica


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